Almost every salary ceiling is low compared to SV but it's all relative.

It's not particularly difficult to achieve a £100k+ salary in London and you can have a very comfortable lifestyle on a six figure income.

Comfortable?

Something of an understatement. There are very few in the UK earn that much...

--edit-- though I do agree money on offer here generally is a joke. Hence going into contracting.

Just out of interest, how?

For a developer, £100k+ as a contractor is not particularly difficult, but as an employee this would be rare, no?

I agree; unless working for google or something, the ceiling for a super-duper dev at hiring time seems to be around 65k -- perhaps a bit more if you stay and negotiate well, but I topped up at 75k before I became a contractor.

Now, this company tax year, I invoiced 120k ex-vat so far, managed to buy a rather large amount of kit on the company (like, that 4k£ dream workstation..) and I finally have the feeling I'm getting paid what I'm worth, without having to do any politics.

I can concentrate on pure engineering, and I don't have to ponder whether I should become some sort of 'manager' to crack up the engineer pay ceiling.

>the ceiling for a super-duper dev at hiring time seems to be around 65k

Not in London. Don't get me wrong, £65k will get you a decent developer but £60k is the starting point for good quality developers in London right now. I'm currently hiring a senior iOS developer and our aim is to hire someone around the £70k mark but I honestly think we'll need to pay more to get the calibre we need.

I've spent the last few years hiring developers in London and I also help run the HN London meet-up and based on first-hand experience along with the huge number of developers I've met through HN London, I can assure you that I'm not exaggerating the figures.

Oh I'm sure in London it's likely to be the case, but I'm around the Thames Valley here. Just the train ticket to London offsets any gain I would have made tho :-)

Anything relatively senior in FinTech encroaches on the six figure salary mark.

Plus there are plenty of experienced Data Scientists getting six figure offers lately. In the past twelve months the market has shifted quite quickly. £60-£70k is becoming the norm for a decent, experienced engineer. Add 'lead' to that title and you'll struggle to find great people for less than £100k.

Considering that £300-£400 per day is a pretty standard contracting rate, companies are ramping up salaries in order to tempt contractors back into salaried roles.

Not for contractors its way higher than permie's pay I have seen year long contracts for data science going at 700/800 per day.

An average day rate for London is £450-500 and that is well north of 100k pa

Tangentially related: I'm a data scientist based in London, and I'm just thinking about becoming a contractor, but I don't see many position. I thought companies, because the strategic knowledge of the position, prefer to have those skills in house... do you think it's true?